


toto, i have a feeling we're not in kansas anymore

by escapismandsharpobjects



Category: Irregulars - Nicole Kimberling & Josh Lanyon & Ginn Hale & Astrid Amara
Genre: Cherries Worth Getting, M/M, Whumptober 2020, field medicine, i hate this kinda but whose ever gonna read it?? no one!!!!!!, so its ok, welcome back to the Me Fandom!! we got me and me and me
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-10-21
Updated: 2020-10-21
Packaged: 2021-03-09 06:21:47
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,895
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/27129187
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/escapismandsharpobjects/pseuds/escapismandsharpobjects
Summary: whumptober day 20 - prompt: field medicine. keith falls through a window in an old building in the middle of nowhere. gunter fixes him up as best he can.
Relationships: Keith Curry/Gunther Heartman
Comments: 2
Kudos: 2
Collections: Whumptober 2020





	toto, i have a feeling we're not in kansas anymore

**Author's Note:**

> hi to me!!! and you if you're reading this for some reason? ngl its bad but oh well.

There’s a crashing sound as NIAD Special Agent Keith Curry falls backwards, shattering through a previously-splintered window of a crumbling old warehouse deep in the middle of nowhere. There’s a brief second when he’s falling, before he hits the ground, which is spent in pure terror, because here he is, in the aforementioned middle of nowhere, falling to his death (or serious injury, anyway). 

And it’s not even like he fell because a suspect pushed him, or because he was jumping heroically for something but  _ just  _ missed. No. He’d tripped over an old wooden crate.  _ I’m so going to catch hell for this later, _ he thinks, just before he slams into the ground.

\--

He blinks his eyes open in a haze of pain. One of his legs is curled awkwardly beneath him, and he feels the telltale pang of a sprained ankle. His left arm is sticking out in such a way that, even if it didn’t hurt like crazy, Keith would know that it’s broken. Breathing is a little difficult at the moment, which is to be expected, considering the two stories he’s just fallen. 

These things on their own hurt. His arm feels like it’s on fire and his ankle is throbbing and his head is spinning. But on top of this, his whole body is vaguely burning, and also vaguely wet. It’s most noticeable on the bare skin of his face hands, which are prickling with the unfamiliar and very disconcerting feeling of hundreds of tiny things being stuck into them. 

He looks at his hands, which are covered in bits of glass, small cuts, and quite a lot of blood. The window, naturally. 

He’s about to try something stupid, like pulling each shard of glass out of his skin with his bare hands just to get it all to  _ stop, _ when he hears Gunther shout his name from a short distance away.

He startles momentarily, having forgotten that he’s not alone in the face of what’s just happened. 

“Keith!” Gunther shouts again, running up to him. “Are you okay? What happened?”

Keith groans. “Fell...through a window,” he says. “Hurts.”

For his part, Gunther doesn’t even question how Keith ended up falling through a window. He just says, “I bet it does,” and crouches down next to Keith, amidst a field of shattered glass. “There’s probably a first-aid kit in the car. I’ll go see.”

And then Gunther is getting up and jogging around to the front of the building and their rental car, which Keith desperately hopes does have that first-aid kit. If nothing else, it’ll have painkillers, he figures, and they can deal with the rest once they make the long drive back to civilization.

“So,” Gunther says, coming back into Keith’s field of vision. He’s holding a small white box, Keith notices, thankfully. “There’s good news and bad news.”

Keith groans again. “Great,” he mutters. 

“There was a first-aid kit in the car. But I couldn’t get through to 911, and I don’t know if you want to try and drive back now, or if you want me to fix what I can and  _ then  _ drive back, or...” He trails off, looking to Keith expectantly.

“We don’t need to call 911, first of all,” Keith says. This isn’t exactly an emergency, he figures. “A few bandaids and a sling and I’ll be fine.”

Gunther crouches back down next to him and sighs. “You need more than that, Keith,” he says, flipping open the kit. “But I’ll do what I can for now.”

And with that, he gets to work. His first order of business is to move the two of them to someplace that isn’t covered in broken glass. He stands up and scoops Keith into his arms in one fluid motion, shushing him when he yelps in pain.

“I know it hurts, but we need to move,” he says apologetically. He walks a few meters away from the glass, around to the side of the building, and sets Keith carefully down in the grass, propping him up against the wall. 

He starts with the injuries that are the easiest to deal with - the cuts. He passes Keith a small packet of ibuprofen, which Keith would love to take gratefully, but unfortunately the glass embedded into his hands stops him from grabbing on to anything. 

“I can’t,” he says, his face turning slightly pink. “Glass in my hands, remember?”

Gunther nods. “Sorry,” he says, and tears open the packet, pouring the small pills into his palm. He feeds them to Keith, who swallows them harshly and coughs. 

“I don’t know how much those will do,” Gunther says. “And there’s not much I can do to make this not hurt.”

Keith shrugs with his right shoulder. “‘S fine,” he says. His whole body is one giant ball of pain right now. What’s a little more?

Using the tweezers from the first-aid kit, Gunther begins the slow process of plucking the glass shards out of Keith’s skin. True to his word, this hurts, but not as much as what follows it. 

“Sorry, sorry,” Gunther says, as Keith tries to squirm away from the cotton ball being dabbed across his face. “I know it hurts, but I have to do this.”

On some level, Keith understands. The alcohol on the cotton ball will stop the cuts from getting infected, or clean them, or something like that. But it  _ stings,  _ over and over, as the alcohol seeps into each individual cut, burning its way across his skin. Something wet drips down his cheek, and he wonders if it’s blood or alcohol or tears.

When his face is finally as cleaned up as it’s going to be, Gunther gently applies small bandages to the largest of the cuts, and when he’s finished, he presses a soft kiss to Keith’s forehead, which makes Keith blush, which makes his cuts start to sting again. It’s worth it, though, he thinks, and feels himself blush more.

Keith doesn’t have time to dwell on that whole thing, though, because then Gunther is moving to his neck, which has luckily been spared most of the glass. Even so, the cleaning process still hurts, and he grits his teeth together to stop from making too much noise, wondering vaguely if they are going to crack from the pressure.

The last part of him that’s been badly affected by the glass is his hands. He winces as Gunther picks up his right hand, holding it by the wrist so he doesn’t push any of the glass further in. The removal and cleaning hurt a little less this time, now that Keith is almost used to them. When it’s over, Gunther wraps his palm in a strip of bandage, leaving his fingers free. Keith takes advantage of that, lacing those fingers together with Gunther’s and barely feeling the slight pain that the action creates.

Gunther indulges him for a few moments, knowing that he’s trying to delay the inevitable. He gently squeezes Keith’s hand, being very careful not to open up any of the cuts further. Eventually, though, he has to move on.

“I need your other hand, Keith.”

Keith looks at him with sad eyes. He absolutely does  _ not  _ want to move his left arm, but he knows he’ll have to, if Gunther is going to remove the glass from his left hand. “It hurts,” he says, very quietly. “I don’t want to move it.”

“You don’t have to move it, okay? I’ll move it, and I’ll be very careful.”

Keith nods, taking a deep breath to steel himself. “Do it.”

Gunther reaches down and picks up Keith’s arm, placing one hand on either side of the very-obvious break. Keith makes a noise like a strangled scream, and Gunther tells him it’s okay, and then it’s over, and Gunther sets Keith’s arm gently down onto his lap. 

He gives Keith a moment to regain his composure before he starts pulling the glass out of the hand, being incredibly delicate in an effort to not move Keith’s hurt arm at all. Keith keeps his eyes clamped shut the whole time and tries not to think about how much it hurts.

Gunther doesn’t try to wrap up the hand when he’s done, knowing that moving it is going to cause far more pain than it’s worth. He puts away the alcohol and the half-empty packet of cotton balls and tells Keith he can open his eyes.

“You’re done?” Keith asks, not sure that he believes it. His arm hadn’t moved even a centimeter. 

“I’m done,” Gunther affirms. “I told you I’d be careful.” He offers up a smile which Keith opens his eyes just in time to see. 

They sit there quietly for a second, until Gunther says, “your arm-”

“I can’t move it again,” Keith interrupts, knowing what Gunther is going to suggest.

“We really should put it in a sling. There’s a bandage here,” Gunther says, holding it out to show Keith. “I would just have to wrap it around your arm and your shoulder, and it would hold your arm still.”

“It’ll  _ hurt,” _ Keith says, and he knows he sounds like a petulant child but it already hurts  _ so goddamn much _ and he  _ really  _ doesn’t want it to hurt any more. 

“It  _ will  _ hurt,” Gunther agrees, “but it’ll hurt less afterwards.”

Keith thinks it over a second. “Okay,” he says, because he knows it’ll make Gunther happy. “But please just get it over with quickly.”

Two minutes later, it’s over, and Keith is panting and very nearly sobbing and his left hand has started to bleed again because he’s clinging onto Gunther’s jacket like a lifeline. He realizes this, and slowly releases the jacket, forcing himself to calm down and breathe normally again.

“We’re almost done,” Gunther promises, as he ties off the bandage. “We just have to get back to the car and then back to the city.”

“Okay,” Keith agrees, and before he can say anything else Gunther is picking him up again, and it hurts as much as it had before, but he’s so tired he doesn’t even bother to make a noise. 

By the time that he’s lying down across the backseat of the car, Keith is feeling extremely grateful for his sling. He knows Gunther had done his best to be careful on their walk over, but there are limits when someone is carrying another person across bumpy ground and then putting them into a car. He’d nearly passed out when Gunther had set him down and his arm had bumped into the seat. Gunther had apologized, but it was fine, really, Keith had promised. 

And he hadn’t been lying. Yes, everything  _ does  _ hurt. This is probably the worst physical pain he’s ever been in. His face and neck and hands still sting. His ankle is still throbbing occasionally. His arm, of course, feels like hell. He’s absolutely miserable. 

But Gunther is in the front seat, tapping his thumbs on the steering wheel as he follows the road that will lead them back to the highway. He’s looking back at Keith every few seconds, and Keith would tell him to focus on the road, but there’s nothing else out here and those looks are almost enough to make him not really mind the pain. So he’s fine. Better than fine, really. He has Gunther.

**Author's Note:**

> thanks for reading yadda yadda,,,now that the formalities are done i know nobody will read this so i'm gonna talk !!  
> today i did my senior picture retakes so i went to school and first off someone was in my parking spot which was just assigned to me which was not very nice :( anyway the jacket that they had was way too big so i had to borrow another dudes jacket which was very nice of him. but sadly my picture doesn't look good anyway but such is life. anywho i just finished writing 200 postcards to mail to voters and my mother brought me a sweatshirt from california so overall it's an ok day. there's my little journal now. if you are actually reading this then sorry to talk on about nothing but whatever!! seriously though if you're like, here, for some reason you Have to hmu bc presumably you Know What This Is!!! and i am so lonely out here so please talk to me ab this


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